dark in a pocket of truth
Apr. 11th, 2024 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI ended up watching the eclipse in Akron, OH, not quite an hour south of Cleveland. Steph's cousin Sarah and her husband Don have a huge house there, and they were happy to put us (me, Steph, Steph's kid Gemma) up for the extended-weekend. Erin made a set of five eclipse mugs, one for everyone there, all a little different in style and shape and handle so folks could pick the one that fit for them; it was a quite nice way to have her there in spirit.
For the big day we went out to some friends of Sarah's, over near Cuyahoga National Park. ("Kayoga," because why would you pronounce all the syllables in a word if you don't have to.) They had a decent yard and a clear view of the sky to the south.
I was expecting the weather to be cloudy, and it was indeed raining Monday morning. But we lucked out: just a few scattered clouds by the time things got started.
We missed the very beginning of the eclipse, not really paying attention, so my first sight through the eclipse glasses was at I guess about 20%. The sun had a cookie-bite out of the bottom-right. Over the next while I kept looking up and the bite grew larger.
At about 75% it started to get noticeably colder and darker, and the wind picked up. Up til that point there'd been some amount of laughter and raucous carrying-on. Starting then folks began to quiet down: not out of any external "oh this is important," just a sense that Something was Happening.
The moon kept climbing up and left, across the sun. Eventually there was just a bright semicircle line. The world outside was dim, and a little chilly and windy, but not much more so than an exceptionally stormy day. The arc slowly shrank down to a quarter-circle, and smaller. And I thought, "is this how it's gonna be?"
Reader, it was not. The step into totality was a lightswitch being thrown, or a bushel over a lamp. I pulled off my glasses and the world had gone to black-and-white. Like moonlight, though even moonlight's coolness has a warmth to it. This light was the cold of... metal, of glass, of the worst compact-fluorescent bulb. A brightness without any sense of heat at all. Shadows and indistinct features everywhere. Everyone silent save for hushed "oh"s.
And overhead the white corona, edges subtly shifting around a fuligin (Wolfe's "blacker than black") sun, a hole in the sky. A minuscule pale-red-orange spike extended at about one-eighty-five degrees, just left of the bottom. A handful of stars, or planets, made themselves visible against a sky whose colour I've forgotten; greyish? A light purple?
I stared, transfixed, until the moon slid just off the disc of the sun. (I was looking right at it, and had a headache for the next fifteen minutes or so.) Everything had desaturated, washed out. The suggestion of colour returned, slowly, as did the warmth, until again at about 75% things were back to "normal."
I carried the quiet within me until well after the moon had fully passed out of the sun's ambit.
I took a few photos but none of them came out. That's okay. I decided well before that I was here to Experience and not Record. I do wish I'd managed to get one of the corona, though.
If I had it to do over again I wouldn't watch the onset of totality through the glasses. I'd also prefer to not be someplace where photosensitive floodlights kept kicking on and off.
Still. Worth it, and then some.
I first encountered that last paragraph in high school, in the liner notes to the Indigo Girls album Rites Of Passage. It stuck with me, I guess the same way it stuck with Emily Saliers so that she had to write the song "Virginia Woolf" to exorcise it. A week or so ago I went looking to see if there was more to it, and, well, found the rest of the above. She might be kinda good at this writing thing.
For the big day we went out to some friends of Sarah's, over near Cuyahoga National Park. ("Kayoga," because why would you pronounce all the syllables in a word if you don't have to.) They had a decent yard and a clear view of the sky to the south.
I was expecting the weather to be cloudy, and it was indeed raining Monday morning. But we lucked out: just a few scattered clouds by the time things got started.
We missed the very beginning of the eclipse, not really paying attention, so my first sight through the eclipse glasses was at I guess about 20%. The sun had a cookie-bite out of the bottom-right. Over the next while I kept looking up and the bite grew larger.
At about 75% it started to get noticeably colder and darker, and the wind picked up. Up til that point there'd been some amount of laughter and raucous carrying-on. Starting then folks began to quiet down: not out of any external "oh this is important," just a sense that Something was Happening.
The moon kept climbing up and left, across the sun. Eventually there was just a bright semicircle line. The world outside was dim, and a little chilly and windy, but not much more so than an exceptionally stormy day. The arc slowly shrank down to a quarter-circle, and smaller. And I thought, "is this how it's gonna be?"
Reader, it was not. The step into totality was a lightswitch being thrown, or a bushel over a lamp. I pulled off my glasses and the world had gone to black-and-white. Like moonlight, though even moonlight's coolness has a warmth to it. This light was the cold of... metal, of glass, of the worst compact-fluorescent bulb. A brightness without any sense of heat at all. Shadows and indistinct features everywhere. Everyone silent save for hushed "oh"s.
And overhead the white corona, edges subtly shifting around a fuligin (Wolfe's "blacker than black") sun, a hole in the sky. A minuscule pale-red-orange spike extended at about one-eighty-five degrees, just left of the bottom. A handful of stars, or planets, made themselves visible against a sky whose colour I've forgotten; greyish? A light purple?
I stared, transfixed, until the moon slid just off the disc of the sun. (I was looking right at it, and had a headache for the next fifteen minutes or so.) Everything had desaturated, washed out. The suggestion of colour returned, slowly, as did the warmth, until again at about 75% things were back to "normal."
I carried the quiet within me until well after the moon had fully passed out of the sun's ambit.
I took a few photos but none of them came out. That's okay. I decided well before that I was here to Experience and not Record. I do wish I'd managed to get one of the corona, though.
If I had it to do over again I wouldn't watch the onset of totality through the glasses. I'd also prefer to not be someplace where photosensitive floodlights kept kicking on and off.
Still. Worth it, and then some.
We had to wait, stamping to keep warm, Leonard kept looking at his watch. Four great red setters came leaping over the moor. There were sheep feeding behind us. There were thin places in the cloud, and some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of these hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping - it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world - druids on Stonehenge. At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over - this is one shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: and the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again; and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills, at first with a glittering and aetheriality. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind - fresh, various - here blue, and there brown: all new colours, as if washed over and repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid.
Then - it was all over till 1999. What remained was a sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light and colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing. Yet when it became established, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness. How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it: being at the mercy of the sky; our own nobility; the druids; Stonehenge and the racing red dogs; all that was in one's mind.
--Virginia Woolf, diary entry for 30 June 1927
I first encountered that last paragraph in high school, in the liner notes to the Indigo Girls album Rites Of Passage. It stuck with me, I guess the same way it stuck with Emily Saliers so that she had to write the song "Virginia Woolf" to exorcise it. A week or so ago I went looking to see if there was more to it, and, well, found the rest of the above. She might be kinda good at this writing thing.